End of Life

End of Life

End of life decisions concern our ability to make choices concerning the end of our lives and take of the form of refusal of life sustaining treatment, being help in committing suicide, choosing euthanasia, and make choices that must be upheld even when the person becomes unconscious. As Young (2010) noted, “People have an interest in making important decisions about their lives in accordance with their own conception of how they want their lives to go.”

Approach

To measure the degree of freedom that a person enjoys with regard to deciding how her life should end, we identified the key decisions that express such freedom as they involve an exercise of autonomy that binds health care professionals.

The freedom to request that active euthanasia is performed

The freedom to request that passive euthanasia is performed

The freedom to be assisted in committing suicide

The freedom to refuse treatment

The freedom to issues specific directive that bind health care professionals in the future